Speed Demon Backend SEO – Do YOU Actually Need It?

Product Name: Speed Demon Backend SEO

Product Owner: Luke Corden

Advertised Price: $9.95

Rating: 50/100

What is it?

Speed Demon is a video course created to help website owners learn to speed up their websites by reducing the time it takes to load essential elements of each page within the website.

Short Review

There are quite a few points you can take away from this course that will help you rank higher within the search results. With that said, this is not a product for beginners, and I feel like advanced SEO users could find similar information just by searching in Google or being part of free SEO communities.

Before You Buy

There are several complex techniques in this course that will confuse any beginner. There’s a lot of work you need to do before you can even think of implementing the lessons from this course. The advice Luke offers is really for advanced marketers in competitive niches.

He refers to his technique as “Backend SEO” but, he never discusses the things that need to be done first.

creating good content

keyword research

simplicity

Those are just a few of the things you would need before you could start using Speed Demon techniques.

What I Liked

Luke Corden definitely knows how to speed up a website. Although the advice he offers is quite advanced, it's still good. If you want to speed up your website there are some tips here that can help you.

Probably the best part of the course was the module on image optimization. Large images and certain file types (like .PNG) can cause your site to load very slowly.

In the image module, Luke discusses how to properly save and resize images so that your server can do it's job quickly. This is sound advice and it's not as advanced as the other parts of the course.

This graph shows the increased load times from popular plugins

Another thing I enjoyed here was the fact that he showed you two options. When it comes to optimizing images on WordPress, you have a few options that involve using a plugin.

The problem is that plugins can slow your site down dramatically, which defeats the purpose if you're using them to optimize images. Luke does a great job of showing you which plugins to use and how to check them.

Throughout the course Luke is adamant about keeping your site not only fast but safe too. He constantly reminds you to get a ‘backup' of your site before and after each of his tips.

This is to ensure you never cause damage to your site or lose anything you've done. This is great advice that's often thrown around but Luke actually shows you how to do it.

In addition to that, the members area is clean and easy to navigate. There’s no unnecessary popups or added distractions. It’s pretty straight forward.

He’s put it all his advice into five modules and broken them down into a few videos. It's simple and clean which was a nice surprise given the content of the course was so advanced. Considering the amount of website optimization information out there, I felt like a lot more could have been included, but for the advertised price, it's really a steal as far as value is concerned.

What I Didn’t Like

It’s worth saying again that this course is for advanced marketers concerned with site speed. Typically website owners looking to gain a competitive edge in the search results would use methods like the ones in Speed Demon.

Given that the course was so advanced I was surprised to see that Luke had allowed all his content to be indexed by Google. That basically means, anyone can gain access to the courses by doing a simple search and without paying.

This isn't something a normal SEO person never does, ever.

Like the course itself, many of the tools Luke uses just aren't realistic for beginners. Things like Photoshop and Filezilla are tools that only advanced webmasters use.

The cost of Photoshop alone is enough to scare away beginners and Filezilla remains to be confusing for even some advanced marketers and site owners. Neither of these is a welcome solution to beginners looking to do simple things like rank better for their keywords and increase their traffic.

Of course there are alternatives to Photoshop but Luke’s methods don’t teach that. To follow him you have to use what he uses. Another big problem in that area is that Luke uses a Mac, he seems to be completely oblivious to PC users.

In addition to that the videos are very difficult to watch. The quality is so low I had to make them full screen and then increase the zoom on my browser just to see what he was doing. This is not the over-the-shoulder situation I’d hoped for.

The testimonials on the sales page stood out to me because they were videos. However, one of the testimonials was from Joshua Zamora who you might remember from my review of Seamless SEO. This is an obvious example of “you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours”.

This proves two things.

1. The testimonials are useless as far as validity. They are essentially paid ads. Joshua Zamora has his face plastered around the internet on various products. To me, his endorsement means nothing.

2. These two guys are just marketers at the end of the day.

I'd be willing to be that both of these guys come out with another product within the year. Why can't the just take all of their “genius” marketing info and package it into ONE product that's improved and added to over time?

It's my personal opinion that they don't care about you, your site, or the value get from the products they create. It's all about product launches and the profit they get from releasing multiple hyped joint ventures.

In the end, there’s always going to be some SEO guy telling everyone he has the magic Google formula. There’s hundreds of them, maybe more. SEO doesn't work that way, it’s more of an art than a science.

If search engine optimization was a one size fits all solution then everyone would know it by now, Google would be out of business and the internet would be very different.

Final Review

This is not something that will teach you internet marketing, or even teach you everything you need to know about SEO. Even though it's only $10, why would you pay money for something that's too advanced for newbies and too incomplete for a serious business owner looking to improve SEO?

Conclusion

SEO is one of the most complicated areas of marketing. There are plenty of professionals who have found a strategy that works for them, but that doesn't mean it will work for you. These guys will show you awesome results on ONE site, but will it work for yours?

It also means you are forever stuck in the cycle of needing support for SEO questions. I find it's a much better strategy to learn HOW SEO works, and then develop your own opinions on what works for you. Being able to make your own decisions with regards to how your site is optimized is a huge advantage in the world of online business.

Instead of using here today, gone tomorrow methods, you need to focus on what makes a website solid and easy to find for your readers. You could spend years doing this on your own, chasing after the latest trick, or you could join a newbie-friendly online business community like I did. They currently have $0 starter accounts for new members.

You can learn all the complexities of marketing including SEO, in a community environment with unlimited support and courses that are easy to follow. How do I know it works? Because you found this page as a direct result of what I learned there.

It’s up to you, but it'll save you the time, money and headaches of trying to follow complicated SEO strategies and will simply get your website profitable.

See you there!

Nathaniell

What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!

Comments

Sarah T.says

January 10, 2018 at 12:50 am

Hey, Nathaniell, thanks for the article. I was curious if you could help me with alt tags. I am working on a new photography business website. Do I need to set up alt tags for all the images that I upload? There will be at least a couple of hundred of them overall, with up to 40 on a single page (it is a portfolio). Do they all need to have unique alt tags? I imagine otherwise Google might consider it spam?

I’ve done some checking around on my own using the likes of http://similarweb.com/ and http://webanalysis.tools/ , and it appears few of my competitors bother with alt tags. Is that something I can win on or is it just not worth the (considerable) time investment?

I don’t think Google will consider it spam, but YES, you should have alt tags for all your images, especially if you’re a photographer. It will help Google understand what your image is about, instead of just labeled as IMG_3000132. It will also help the seeing impaired read your website, and make it more searchable, rank-able, and therefore preferable to rank over other websites with similar content. You should also consider naming your images something specific BEFORE uploading, since that can contribute to image SEO too. Instead of IMG_3000132, call your pictures something short and descriptive (Alt Tags can be longer)

If you don’t have the time, you can easily outsource this for a few bucks an hour. Try UpWork.com